October 08, 2015

Pride and Prejudice at 20: The Scene That Changed Everything

Hard to believe this was screened 20 years ago!

I have watched it a few times as well as the older version with Greer Garson and Sir Lawrence Olivier.Here's a scene from it:

“I was reading an article in the
Radio Times the other day,” says Andrew Davies. “The journalist was asking, ‘Why
have all these classic serials got to be about the male lead getting his kit
off?’ And I thought, ‘Hey! I started that!’”He certainly did. It was Davies who wrote the
screenplay for the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, a series which first screened exactly 20 years ago. And it was
Davies, not Austen, who had Mr Darcy (Colin Firth) going for an impromptu dip
in his private lake, before striding away in his clinging wet shirt and bumping
into his future bride, Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle). Ever since, it seems,
the makers of every new BBC costume drama have included their own tribute to
this moment, whether it’s Aidan Turner’s topless scything in Poldark, Richard
Madden’s under-dressed carpentry in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or Ben Batt’s
skinny-dipping in The Go-Between. It’s fair to say that when Darcy dived into
the water two decades ago, he made quite a splash.But even before its brooding hero
took the plunge in episode four, Pride and Prejudice was a sensation. Ten
million viewers were glued to it; newspaper columns – most notably Helen
Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, at that time a regular feature in the
Independent before it was a hit book and film – were stricken by ‘Darcymania’. It was a truth universally acknowledged that there had never been a costume
drama quite like Pride and Prejudice. The remarkable thing is that there hasn’t
been one like it since, either. A Bollywoodised Bride & Prejudice followed
in 2004, and Keira Knightley played Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s film in
2005. But however many Austen adaptations there are on the big and small
screens, it’s the Davies version which they invariably try – and fail – to
beat.

It’s almost usurped the original
novel in the minds of the public,” says Professor Deborah Cartmell of DeMontford
University, the author of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: The Relationship
Between Text and Screen. “Since it came out, every cultural reference to Jane
Austen, and every adaptation, has had as much to do with Andrew Davies as it
does to Austen.” Two recent comedies are clear examples. ITV’s 2008 series, Lost
in Austen, and a 2013 film, Austenland, both revolve around Pride and Prejudice
addicts – but the Mr Darcy they dream about is the damp one played by Firth.
“I’ve taught the lake scene so many times,” says Professor Cartmell, “and when
my students read the novel for the first time they are absolutely shocked that
that scene isn’t in it.”Any
excuseStill, there’s more to the series
than soggy menswear. Professor Kathryn Sutherland examines Davies’ adaptation in
her book, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood. For her, the
key to the programme’s appeal is its combination of cinematic visuals and
televisual pacing. “It has the same qualities that we associate with the
big-screen Austen adaptations of the time, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and
Douglas McGrath’s Emma, with Gwyneth Paltrow. Like them, it has moving cameras,
quick cuts, open landscapes, and the emotional intensity of a strong musical
score. But because it was broadcast over six weeks, it could keep us waiting for
the happy ending, so there was a cumulative excitement and a public
participation in it that you can’t get from a two-hour film.”Prior to Pride and Prejudice, no
one would have compared a British television costume drama to a feature film.
“They were very well done,” says Davies of his predecessors’ efforts, “but at
least 70% of the scenes were shot in studios, with quite wobbly sets, and with
people standing around, buttoned up to their necks, making polite
conversation.”Davies and the series’ producer,
Sue Birtwistle, had something else planned. Their Pride and Prejudice would get
out of the studio and into the sun-dappled countryside. It would be shot
entirely on 16mm film, rather than falling back on the cheaper film and video
combination of earlier costume dramas. And, four years before The West Wing
became known for its ‘walk-and-talk’ dialogue scenes, its characters would
always be on the move, whether they were in carriages, on horseback or tramping
through meadows.“Sue and I talked a lot about
this,” says Davies. “We wanted lots of energy in the show, and the book
justifies it, because Elizabeth is always running about and going on long
country walks and getting all flushed and sweaty and getting the bottom of her
petticoat muddy, which seems to be quite a turn-on for Darcy. So we thought,
let’s make it as physical as we can without being ridiculous about it. Let’s
remind the audience that this isn’t just a social comedy – it’s about desire and
young people and their hormones – and let’s try to find ways of showing that as
much as possible. So for the girls I wrote a lot of scenes where they’re
backstage, so to speak: they’re getting dressed, they’re in their nighties,
talking about love. And we wanted the guys to be doing lots of physical things:
riding horses, fencing, having baths, jumping in the lake. Any legitimate excuse
to get some of that kit off.”Unintended
consequencesIn bringing this youthful
dynamism to the screen, Davies and Birtwistle had some invaluable collaborators.
Simon Langton, the series’ director, keeps the action flowing so elegantly that
it’s astonishing, in retrospect, that he wasn’t snapped up by Hollywood. Carl
Davis’s sprightly theme music whisks the listener along like a leaf in a breeze,
immediately assuring us that Pride and Prejudice won’t be dusty and educational:
it will be fun. And Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennet sends the same message. Her
vivacious performance tends to be overshadowed by the Firth-inspired Darcymania,
but every time she giggles or raises her eyebrows, she lets us know that
Elizabeth is laughing at all the snobbery around her, so it’s OK for us to laugh
too.But however important Langton,
Davis and Ehle’s contributions were, it was Davies who instilled the series with
thrilling vitality, beginning with its very first scene. “The obvious way to
start,” he says, “would be with a scene set around the breakfast table with Mr
Bennet saying, ‘I see there’s a new family in the area.’ But I didn’t want to do
that. Also, I wanted to make the adaptation very pro-Darcy, so I thought, ‘Let’s
start with him and Bingley galloping along on their horses – nobody has ever
done that before. And that’s the thing that sets the whole story off: Bingley
seeing Netherfield Hall and being rich enough to make the snap decision to rent
it for the season. Then I thought, ‘Let’s have Elizabeth on a hillside seeing
these two tasty blokes galloping along, and something about them makes her skip
down the hill’. I can remember writing those first pages and thinking, ‘This is
a bit different from the usual Jane Austen adaptation’. I ran upstairs and
showed them to my daughter, who was revising for her A-levels. I said, ‘What do
you think of that? She said, ‘Very good, Dad,’ because she’s been trained not to
say, ‘That’s crap, Dad.’ And those pages gave me a lot of confidence to charge
on with it all at that pace.”And so we come to the lake scene,
which, Davies maintains, was never intended to spark Darcymania. “When women
started pinning Colin’s picture on their walls, it was a puzzle and a surprise,”
he says, “because I just thought it was a funny scene. It was about Darcy being
a bloke, diving in his lake on a hot day, not having to be polite – and then he
suddenly finds himself in a situation where he does have to be polite. So you
have two people having a stilted conversation and politely ignoring the fact
that one of them is soaking wet. I never thought it was supposed to be a sexy
scene in any way.”Whether the writers of Poldark,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Go-Between can make the same claim is another
matter.